After Uber, Musk's Tesla rocked with sexual harassment suit

Engaged in a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment and discriminatory treatment,Vandermeyden has now accused Tesla for firing her for going public with her allegationsChhavi Tyagi | ECONOMICTIMES.COM | June 02, 2017, 17:05 IST

Elon Musk's electric car company Tesla has been accused of firing a female engineer in an act of retaliation after she accused the company of ignoring her complaints of sexual harassment and discriminatory pay. According to a report by The Guardian, the female employee, AJ Vandermeyden, was fired this week by Tesla.

Engaged in a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment and discriminatory treatment,Vandermeyden has now accused Tesla for firing her for going public with her allegations.

The Guardian reports that Tesla had made a statement to it denying the new accusation: "Despite repeatedly receiving special treatment at the expense of others, Ms Vandermeyden nonetheless chose to pursue a miscarriage of justice by suing Tesla and falsely attacking our company in the press. After we carefully considered the facts on multiple occasions and were absolutely convinced that Ms Vandermeyden’s claims were illegitimate, we had no choice but to end her employment at Tesla," Tesla's spokesperson told the Guardian.

In her lawsuit, Vandermeyden had alleged Tesla for ignoring her complaints about the harassment she was subjected to by some of her male counterparts. She alleged that she was made to suffer “unwelcome and pervasive harassment by men on the factory floor including but not limited to inappropriate language, whistling, and catcalls” during her tenure with the car manufacturer.

Alleging systematic discrimination, Vandermeyden has also accused Tesla management for promoting male engineers over her and other women employees, even though they were "equally or more qualified" than the men. Vandermeyden had joined Tesla in 2013 and she was terminated earlier this week.

Vandermeyden's lawyer has called her termination a "clear retaliation", an act considered illegal in the state of California.

Tesla continues to refute Vandermeyden's claims saying the company only fired her after "conducting a thorough internal investigation" and finding that she behaved in a "fundamentally false and misleading manner and not as a result of retaliation for the lawsuit," reported The Guardian.

Incidentally, the newspaper published an investigation earlier this month on the working conditions at Tesla in which several workers complained about their treatment at the plant located in Fremont in California.